Businesses have increasingly discovered that the Internet can be an effective forum for recruiting participants for the purpose of executing a survey. Rather than rely upon in-person solicitations on the street and in shopping malls, a variety of survey services leverage Web-enabled survey solicitation mechanisms. Such survey solicitation mechanisms, often in the form of pop-up windows, seek willing survey participants from the millions of user's surfing the Internet on a daily basis. The purpose and subject-matter with which the surveys are associated (e.g., products, services, opinions, political views/elections, sporting events, health, etc.) is virtually limitless.
A particular example of on-line survey fulfillment services involves surveying users that have been exposed to a particular on-line advertisement campaign (exposed group)—as well as those that have not been exposed (control group)—to gauge the effect/impression of the ad campaign on the exposed users. In addition to being a good advertising forum, the Internet has also proven to be a convenient source of consumer survey participants to assess the impact of particular Internet advertising campaigns on exposed users.
Recruiting users to take surveys can be a challenging task. U.S. Pat. No. 6,070,145, entitled “RESPONDENT SELECTION METHOD FOR NETWORK-BASED SURVEY” proposes a method in which visitors to a Web site are randomly chosen to be solicited to take an on-line survey. If a visitor is chosen, then a graphic image soliciting the visitor to take the survey is transmitted from a surveyor to the Web site being visited. The image is then displayed to the visitor. If the visitor is not chosen, then a dummy image is displayed.
Another survey method is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,010,497, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EVALUATING AND/OR MONITORING EFFECTIVENESS OF ON-LINE ADVERTISING.” The method described therein involves determining whether a user has been exposed to an on-line ad campaign by checking cookies stored on the user's computer. Based, at least in part, on this determination, a decision is made as to whether or not to solicit the user to take an on-line survey.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/900,674, filed Jul. 6, 2001, entitled “Method and System for Conducting An On-Line Survey,” describes yet another way to carry out on-line surveys. In that system, in response to receiving a request for a block of data from a user's computer, a determination is made whether the user has previously been solicited to take an on-line survey. Thereafter, computer-readable instructions are returned with the requested block of data that facilitate invoking a procedure for soliciting the user to take an on-line survey.
A known survey recruitment method supplements (“tags”) advertisements downloaded from ad servers such that the downloaded advertisements include executable instructions for launching a pop-up survey participation invitation via a browser if cookies associated with the browser indicate the browser previously executed an advertisement corresponding to an ad campaign relating to a survey of current interest. Such browsers are deemed to belong to an “exposed” group of potential survey participants. In the same known survey recruitment method, a set of survey participants are recruited from a “control group” (i.e., ones where the browser does not indicate previous execution of an on-line ad from an ad campaign of interest) in reliance on publishers of on-line (e.g., banner) advertisements. In particular, the ad servers are relied upon to insert recruitment messages in a percentage of on-line advertisements downloaded to users/browsers. Proper assessment of an ad campaign's strength relies upon the successful completion of a sufficient number of surveys by participants from the control group and participants from the exposed group.